If you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research ...

The vocoder—the musical instrument that gave Kraftwerk its robotic sound—began as an early telecommunications device and a top-secret military encoding machine. sort of alienated from your body. It ...

Before T-Pain was using Auto-Tune to buy girls drinks, Franklin D. Roosevelt was using the vocoder to win World War II. In “How to Wreck a Nice Beach,” music critic Dave Tompkins (The Wire, Vibe) ...

The vocoder—part military technology, part musical instrument—has had quite a history. In our new Object of Interest video, we explore the vocoder in settings ranging from the Second World War to ...

Among the group’s top five vocoder tracks are a Belgian disco stomp from the 70s, Anderson’s O Superman, Kraftwerk’s Robots, and a slice of fine Italodisco This Belgian disco number is a fine example ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Originally developed for telecommunications and military applications in the 1930s, the vocoder, ...